The Mount (novel)

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For author Edith Wharton's country estate, see The Mount (Lenox, Massachusetts).

For the school in York, see The Mount School, York.

For the stadium in Catford, see The Mount stadium.

The Mount is a 2002 science fantasy novel, ISBN 0-14-240302-4, by Carol Emshwiller than won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award for that year.

The title character and first-person narrator, Charley, is a young man who like all humans is impressed into service as riding mounts (e.g. horses) for the physically dimunitive Hoots. Humans in Charley's world, a pastoral Earth, have existed in a master-slave relationship with the Hoots for centuries. The Hoots, who have no way to return to their home planet, maintain the natural systems that keep the world running. Escaped mounts like Charley's father, formerly the Guards' Mount known as Heron, lead assaults on the stables where humans are kept and seek to unify their own people against the Hoots.

When Charley (mount name Smiley) meets his father for the first time (Heron and Merry Mary were mated and separated by the Hoots soon after Charley was born), he resists betraying either his Master, the Hoot heir apparent, or anything that might help the resisting humans because his life as a mount (breed Seattle) is the only one he's ever known.

The story culminates when the unidentified power source the Hoots use to maintain dominance over humans begins to wear down. After his father's death, Charley becomes de facto leader of the Free Humans and, in open negotiations with his former Master, now leader of the Hoots on Earth, agrees for humans and Hoots to work together rather than kill one another.

The author was inspired to write The Mount after she took a class in the psychology of prey animals. After the class, Emshwiller wondered what it would be like if a smart prey animal rode a predator, and she saw no way to express that idea except as science fiction.